First off you may have noticed the OPC Foundation blogs have a cool new look.  Hope everyone likes it J

Next would be the Newsletter.  The March issue of OPConnect has hit the wires.  As always it’s chock full of information like ABB’s support of the OPC UA based OPC ADI specification, new product announcements like the latest addition to OPC support for Building Automation, the OPC Server for Johnson Controls N2 and the feature article on the what’s upcoming this year, including the new OPC Certification Lab.

Tom also outlines the OPC Foundation’s goals and game plan for this year.  They include:

1)    The formation of an OPC Foundation Certification Lab in Scottsdale, Ariz., to certify OPC compliance and interoperability.
2)    The complete release of the OPC Unified Architecture specifications, and an open-source type of licensing strategy.
3)    The release of numerous companion specifications to OPC Unified Architecture that facilitate plug-ins to collaborative partners’ information models, inclusive of the FDI, DI, and ADI models discussed above.
4)    The establishment of a working group for the second generation of the OPC Unified Architecture.

The members of the TAC, the various OPC UA working groups and other members have been hard at work on these issues now for the last several months.  I’ll be blogging on these topics as they get closer to being finalized.  The full details on the new Certification Lab opening in Scottsdale, Arizona will be coming very soon.  With all the cost crunching going on these days no one can afford project delays or messing around with implementation problems due to uncertified servers or OPC client interoperability problems.  Having a North American testing facility will be helpful to a lot of companies.

The other item that will interest a lot of folks will be the ‘second generation of OPC UA’.  The TAC is currently working on the charter for this, so I can’t go into a lot of details.  However I will say that this working group is not looking at adding ‘a bunch of new cool features’ into OPC UA.  A lot of time was spent making sure the existing specifications met people’s needs and was robust and extensible.  The focus on the second generation working group is to look at what can be done at the specification level, Profiles and other related activities to make implementing and adopting OPC UA easier.  Beyond the existing SDKs, binary adapters, Conferences and training, the new working group will look at how to streamline OPC UA and aid implementation efforts without impacting interoperability.  More to come on that in the next few weeks.

In the New Stuff category, the latest version of the OPC UA SDK’s have been released.  You can check them out here.

And finally, a bit of an update to the OPC Foundation page.  It now has a scrolling list of new OPC UA products.  Check it out, you might find an OPC UA product that meets your needs.

UPDATE:  The press release on the new OPC Certification Test Lab can be found here.